Contribution short abstract:

Two distinct representational and cognitive practices, maps and narratives, are interconnected with reference to several Aegean modern insular communities. Can we further elaborate the concept of “narrative maps” through transdisciplinary theoretical and methodological tools?

Contribution long abstract:

This contribution draws in previous work on narrative maps as a means of spatial cognition, but also collective, social, and religious memory. In the occasion of this workshop, I propose further investigation of this social and cognitive practice, which proves to be precariously dependent on the uses of landscape and the pressure for economic development – in terms of sustainability or not. We thus attempt to link two distinct representational practices, maps and narratives, with reference to long fieldwork in several Aegean modern insular communities. Here, the concept of “narrative maps” acquires both the meaning of collective representations and of a complex cognitive function for memorising and mapping space through bodily transfers and collective memory. To what extent is a community able to preserve collective memory with its maps spontaneously? How the experience of space permeates collectivity through narratives, then and now?

A transdisciplinary approach of the concept “narrative maps”, as individual, social and fieldwork practice, would be of major interest for a large number of combined disciplines, such as anthropology, ethnoarchaelogy and folkloristics, behavioural geography, cognitive studies and (social) neuroscience.